Thursday, April 28, 2016

April 28, 2016 (BBC News Europe) Children
are still being born with severe birth defects and rare types of cancer in
areas near to Chernobyl, according to a British charity, three decades on from
the world's worst civil nuclear disaster. The accident on 26 April 1986
contributed to the downfall of the Soviet Union, changed the way the world
thinks about nuclear energy and has affected an unquantifiable number of people
in the region. For British pediatrician Dr Rachel Furley, the "desperately
sad" reality is that women who have spent their entire lives exposed to
high levels of radiation are now having children. She says that in the most
severe cases babies have limbs missing and in one case a baby was born with two
heads. When Dr Furley is not treating children in Bury St Edmunds, she helps
800 youngsters in Gomel, a region of Belarus. She set up the charity Bridges to
Belarus when she was still at medical school. It now gives families clothing,
school materials and accommodation, as well as food during the harsh winter,
English lessons and healthcare. The organization also provides pain relief,
palliative care and potentially lifesaving blood tests for the unusually high
number of children with cancer, in a region where state healthcare is often
lacking.

Friday, April 15, 2016

April 15, 2016 (NavyTimes)United
States Navy Destroyer USS Donald Cook operating in international waters in the
Baltic Sea experienced several close interactions by Russian aircraft on April
11 and 12. Russian pilots rattled nerves aboard the destroyer Donald Cook, buzzing
within yards of the ship in the Baltic Sea. Provocative, sure. But they weren't
a credible threat.

So concludes a retired Navy commanding officer, who reviewed
photos and videos from the run-ins on Monday and Tuesday, when unarmed Sukhoi
Su-24 fighters flew within 1,000 feet of the ship - once coming as close as 30
feet in what U.S. officials called "simulated attacks." On Monday, a
low-flying Russian Ka-27 Helix helicopter also appeared to take photos of the
ship. This was definitely provocative, but it doesn't amount to a threat, said
the retired frigate and cruiser CO.

"Well, we’re not at war with
Russia," Capt. Rick Hoffman said. "It would be one thing to be
operating and have a threatening attack profile from someone who might not
recognize me - that’s not the case here." If you have visual
identification of the jet, can see it isn't carrying weapons, and don't detect
any electronic emissions suggesting there was a missile lock on the ship,
there's nothing to be done. And ultimately, the rules of engagement put the CO
in charge of how to respond. "You don’t get to kill people just because
they’re being annoying,"

said Hoffman, who commanded frigate DeWert and
cruiser Hue City. Cruisers are the fleet's foremost air defense platform and
are tasked with guarding flattops from incoming threats.

Thursday, April 14, 2016

April 14, 2016 (UNIAN) The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on Thursday
appointed Parliament Speaker Volodymyr Groysman to the post of Prime Minister
of Ukraine, having dismissed from this post Arseniy Yatsenyuk.
Then the Verkhovna Rada adopted a resolution on the formation of the Cabinet of
Ministers. According to UNIAN, voted 239 deputies out of 367
MPs registered in the session hall voted for the move. As noted by Rada Speaker
Andriy Parubiy, the motion proposes appointment of nominations offered by
President Poroshenko (meaning, candidates for the posts of Defense Minister and
Foreign Minister), and the candidates promoted by Prime Minister Groysman. The
proposed composition of a new Cabinet was personally voiced by PM
Groysman at the session hall. “I’d like for it to be the government,
which, having your support, would return confidence of the people in the
authorities in general,” said Groysman.

The following officials were named:

Stepan Kubiv is to become First Deputy Prime Minister – Minister of
Economic Development and Trade (Presidential envoy in parliament, MP);

Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers – Oleksandr Saenko (Rada’s chief of
staff);

Finance Minister – Oleksandr Danylyuk (former adviser to Viktor
Yanukovych; headed the coordination center on implementation of economic
reforms since 2010; in July 2014 appointed representative of Petro Poroshenko
to the Cabinet; in September 2015, the president appointed him Deputy Head of
Presidential Administration)

Minister of Energy and Coal Industry – Ihor Nasalik (between April 2002
and March 2005 – MP, used to be chairman of subcommittee on oil industry and
petroleum products supply of the Rada Committee on fuel and energy complex,
nuclear policy and nuclear security).

At the same time, the nomination for the post of Minister of Health has
not been voiced.

After this, the ministers vowed allegiance as Groysman voiced it from
the rostrum.

Tuesday, April 12, 2016

April 12, 2016 (The New York
Times) This article was written by Oliver Bullough who is a writer specializing
in corruption, tax havens and the former Soviet Union. Here you can read just a
few most bright quotations taken from this article.

.....

Corruption on such a scale,
economy-wide, would cripple any state, let alone one as fragile as this one. In
1991, Ukraine’s G.D.P. was about two-thirds of Poland’s G.D.P.; now, it is less
than one-quarter. Corruption has ruined this country, dooming a generation of
Ukrainians to poor education, unsafe streets and blighted careers.

.....

In August 2014, when Ukrainian
soldiers were trapped under artillery bombardments during the battle of
Ilovaisk, President Petro Poroshenko, a candy magnate, was setting up a
corporate vehicle in the British Virgin Islands. While young men were dying to
defend Ukraine, their commander-in-chief was looking for ways to deny Ukraine
taxes from his own business empire.

.....

In 2006, a court in California
sentenced Pavlo Lazarenko, Ukraine’s prime minister in 1996-97, to nine years
in prison for misusing his post to extort tens of millions of dollars from
Ukrainians. By the time he was released in 2012, hundreds of millions of
dollars more had been stolen from Ukraine.

.....

It’s difficult to chart the
precise dimensions of this corruption. It is a submerged leviathan, and small
bits of it are only occasionally exposed by brave Ukrainian investigators or
forensic probes from abroad.

Monday, April 11, 2016

April 11,
2016 (BBC Europe) The Ukrainian Prime Minister, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, has
announced he will resign next week, blaming politicians' failure to enact
"real changes". Mr Yatsenyuk, in office since former pro-Russian
President Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in February 2014, said he would inform
parliament on Tuesday. The current President, Petro Poroshenko, asked him to
quit in February, saying he had lost support. His government has been accused
of inaction and corruption. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has
threatened to withhold aid money if it does not carry out reforms.

Parliamentary
Speaker Volodymyr Groysman has been nominated by President Poroshenko's party to
replace Mr Yatsenyuk. US Vice-President Joe Biden, in a call to Mr Yatsenyuk on
Sunday, congratulated him on "accomplishments over the past two
years", including economic reforms, but said "these changes must be
irreversible".

Mr Yatsenyuk came to power promising
to tackle corruption and implement economic reforms but has increasingly become
the focus of accusations of corruption, even though no concrete evidence was
produced. Western governments have expressed concern over the resignation of
reform-minded figures from the government. President Poroshenko himself came
under scrutiny this week after leaked documents suggested he had set up an
offshore company as a tax haven using Panamanian legal firm Mossack Fonseca. He
said he had done nothing wrong and Ukrainian prosecution officials said there
was no evidence of a crime but there were calls for his impeachment.

Monday, April 4, 2016

April 4, 2016 (New York Times) A group of news media outlets published
articleson Sunday based on what they
said were 11.5 million leaked documents from aPanamalaw
firm that helped some of the world’s wealthiest people - including politicians,
athletes and business moguls – establishoffshore
bankaccounts. The German newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung said its reporters had obtained the documents from a
confidential source. The newspaper then shared the files with other media
organizations, like The Guardian and the International Consortium of
Investigative Journalists. In an article, the investigative journalism
organization said the documents revealed the offshore accounts of 140
politicians and public officials, including a dozen current and former world
leaders and several individuals with close ties to PresidentVladimir Putinof Russia. The organization said reporters
at 100 news media outlets working in 25 languages had used the documents to
investigate the law firm, Mossack Fonseca, and its clients, including political
figures in countries like Iceland, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The revelations
also touchedUkraine’s president,
Petro Poroshenko, who was elected in the aftermath of the political upheaval in
the country in 2014 that led to the annexation of Crimea and open conflict with
Russia in eastern Ukraine. Mr. Poroshenko, a tycoon with assets in television
and a chocolatier before his entrance into politics, pledged to divest himself
of his holdings but instead moved the assets into an offshore company in the
British Virgin Islands, according to the consortium’s reporting. It said that
Mr. Poroshenko, who has received political support from the United States, had
not disclosed the arrangement.

Friday, April 1, 2016

April 1, 2016 (The New York Times)
The Ukrainian Parliament finally voted to oust Ukraine’s odious prosecutor general,
Viktor Shokin, on Tuesday. The United States and European countries that have provided
aid to Ukraine had long pressed for his dismissal; in his year in office, Mr. Shokin
became a symbol of Ukraine’s deeply ingrained culture of corruption, failing to
prosecute a single member of the deposed Yanukovych regime or of the current government
while blocking the efforts of reform-minded deputies. Alas, nothing is likely to
change unless President Petro Poroshenko and Parliament agree to install some real
corruption fighters and approve serious judicial reform.

Corruption has been pervasive in Ukraine
since independence, fed by close-knit ties between politicians and oligarchs and
a weak justice system. The protests in 2014 that led to the removal of President
Viktor Yanukovych were largely fueled by popular fury at his monumental corruption
and abuse of power. Yet his overthrow has yet to show results.

In a speech in Odessa last September,
the United States ambassador, Geoffrey Pyatt, said corruption was as dangerous for
Ukraine as was the Russian support for a military insurgency in eastern Ukraine.
And on a visit last December, Vice
President Joseph Biden Jr. said corruption was eating Ukraine “like a cancer.” Among
the examples Mr. Pyatt cited was the seizure in Britain of $23 million in illicit
assets from the former Ukrainian ecology minister, Mykola Zlochevsky; Mr. Shokin’s
office, however, declared that there was no case against the minister, and the money
was released.

In his last hours in office, Mr. Shokin
dismissed the deputy prosecutor general, David Sakvarelidze, a former prosecutor
in Georgia brought in by President Poroshenko to fight corruption. And before that,
Mr. Shokin had systematically cleansed his office of reform-minded prosecutors.
The acting prosecutor general now is Yuriy Sevruk, a crony who can be trusted to
continue Mr. Shokin’s practices.

Mr. Poroshenko, himself a product
of the old system, has had his hands full with the Moscow-backed separatists in
the east and unceasing political turmoil in Kiev, where Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk’s
government is hanging by a thread.